Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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When it comes to online banking, sub-optimal encryption isn’t our biggest concern
Malware authors and scammers won’t attack the crypto. Under the headline “no zero-day necessary”, Xiphos has published a rather scary blog post on the state of SSL security within the UK’s finance industry. It concludes that more than 50% of UK-owned retail banks have weak SSL implementations on their online banking sites, with 14% of…
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Malware likely cause of power cut in Ukraine
BlackEnergy malware previously linked to targeted attacks in the country. When in late December hundreds of thousands of homes in Western Ukraine suffered power outages, many people talked about the possibility of the interruption in power having been caused by a cyber-attack. But people always talk about cyber-attacks — the truth is almost always a…
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Call for Papers: VB2016 Denver
VB seeks submissions for the 26th Virus Bulletin Conference. Virus Bulletin is seeking submissions from those wishing to present papers at VB2016 , which will take place 5 to 7 October 2016 at the Hyatt Regency Denver Hotel in Denver, Colorado, USA. Originally started as an annual gathering of anti-virus experts, the VB conference has…
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VB2015 video: Making a dent in Russian mobile banking phishing
Sebastian Porst explains what Google has done to protect users from phishing apps targeting Russian banks. In the last few years, mobile malware has evolved from a mostly theoretical threat to a very serious one that affects many users. Indeed, several talks at VB2015 dealt with various aspects of mobile security in general and that…
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Conference review: Botconf 2015
Third botnet fighting conference another big success. Though only in its third year, Botconf has already become a regular fixture in my schedule. And thus, after having attended the conference in Nantes in 2013 and in Nancy in 2014 , this year I joined more than 250 others for the three-day conference on botnets at…
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High spam catch rates continue in latest spam filter test
US presidential candidates regularly see their emails blocked by spam filters. Yet again, there was good news for most participants in the bi-monthly VBSpam spam filters tests: spam catch rates for most products remained very high. There was good news when it came to false positives too. Solutions blocked few to no emails from the…
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Throwback Thursday: A View from the Lab
This Throwback Thursday, VB heads back to 1997 with ‘A View from the Lab’. According to its website, the AV-TEST Institute currently registers over 390,000 new malicious programs every day. Back in mid-1997 though, new viruses and variants were appearing at a rate of over 250 per month, and according to Dr Solomon’s Software virus…
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Paper: Optimizing ssDeep for use at scale
Brian Wallace presents tool to optimize ssDeep comparisons. Malware rarely comes as a single file, and to avoid having to analyse each sample in a set individually, a fuzzy hashing algorithm tool like ssDeep can tell a researcher whether two files are very similar — or not similar at all. When working with a large…
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Throwback Thursday: Legal attempts to reduce spam. A UK perspective
This Throwback Thursday, we turn the clock back to November 2003, when spam was such a hot topic that VB decided to launch a dedicated ‘VB Spam Supplement’. While, today, spam is a problem that is generally very well mitigated, 12 years ago it was a subject of growing concern and was becoming of increasing…
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Paper: 3ROS exploit framework kit — one more for the infection road
Aditya K. Sood and Rohit Bansal highlight a different side of an exploit kit. Exploit kits are a serious plague on the Internet, made worse by the fact that the online advertisement ecosystem allows cybercriminals to run their malicious code on many websites. The kits are studied extensively by security researchers, who attempt to follow…
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